no knead bread

This post is late. I made no kneed bread for the first time over a month ago for our fourth annual Post-Thanksgiving dinner party. It's not traditional Post-Thanksgiving fare -- concocted from whatever is left after the grandiose meals our families prepare, usually hodgepodged and decidedly unattractive. But someone at our last party asked if I had baked my own bread for the pot roast sandwiches (recipe coming soon, I promise) and I took it as a challenge because I am hyper-sensitive. The bread is beautiful, perfectly tanned with a handsome seam, and delicious. Listening to the crackle of crust fresh from the oven is the single most pleasureful experience of my modest baking career.

I sometimes imagine that if I were more a confident person I'd have a higher-paying job for which I'd travel the world, visiting the homes of expatriate writers, carrying vintage handbags. A glamorous life indeed. But would I bake my own bread? Probably not. So alls well that ends well.  



Recipe from Mother Earth News.

 

INGREDIENTS

1/4 tsp dry active yeast

1 1/2 cups warm water

3 cups all-purpose flower

1 1/2 tsp salt

Cornmeal or wheat bran for dusting

DIRECTIONS

In a large bowl, dissolve yeast in water. Add the salt and flour, stirring until blended. The dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap. Let the dough rest at least 8 hours, preferably 12 to 18, at warm room temperature.

The dough is ready when its surface is dotted with bubbles. Lightly flour a work surface and place dough on it. Sprinkle it with a little more flour and fold it over on itself once or twice. Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let it rest for about 15 minutes.

Using just enough flour to keep the dough from sticking to the work surface or to your fingers, gently shape it into a ball. Generously coat a clean dish towel with flour, wheat bran or cornmeal. Put the seam side of the dough down on the towel and dust with more flour, bran or cornmeal. Cover with another towel and let rise for about 1 to 2 hours. When it’s ready, the dough will have doubled in size and will not readily spring back when poked with a finger.

At least 20 minutes before the dough is ready, heat oven to 475 degrees. Put a 6- to 8-quart dutch oven in the oven as it heats. When the dough is ready, carefully remove the pot from the oven and lift off the lid. Slide your hand under the towel and turn the dough over into the pot, seam side up. The dough will lose its shape a bit in the process, but that’s OK. Give the pan a firm shake or two to help distribute the dough evenly, but don’t worry if it’s not perfect; it will straighten out as it bakes.

Cover and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the lid and bake another 15 to 20 minutes, until the loaf is beautifully browned. Remove the bread from the Dutch oven and let it cool on a rack for at least 1 hour before slicing. 

tea with amanda

My friend Amanda the baker had me over for tea. She's currently nesting in her parent's guest house with her fiancee, Adam the actor/playwright. We've been friends for six years and I've never seen her yard. It's like The Secret Garden fell to disrepair in suburban Los Angeles, by which I mean it's the most romantic little yellow house I've ever had the privilege to visit. She has an industrial stainless steel sink and a dozen fruit trees growing outside. I adore it.

She asked me if I wanted a scone and I said yes, of course, assuming that she had some lying around. Instead, she took out a mixing bowl and set to making me a fresh batch of Meyer Lemon Strawberry Scones. Charmingly amorphous and lightly fragrant, they were perfect with blood orange marmalade and our loose leaf Earl Grey/rose tea mixture on a Wednesday afternoon in her new home.

MEYER LEMON STRAWBERRY SCONES

Preheat your oven to 350.

In a bowl, combine:
1/2 cup sugar
zest of 3 Meyer lemons
and rub together with your fingertips until the sugar is fragrant with the oils of the zest.

Add:
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tblsp baking powder
3 cups all purpose flour
and toss together with your hands.

Add 8 ounces of cold butter, cut into cubes and use the pad of your thumb to push the cubes of butter against the base of your forefinger into long flakes that look like giant fish scales. The motion is like a slow, deliberate, forceful version of the hand gesture that normally means "cash" when done quickly and repetitively. Do this fairly quickly and don't worry about making all of them perfect. The goal is to have long flaky bits of cool butter in your dough that will melt and steam in the oven, creating long flaky pockets of buttery goodness in your dough.

When all of the butter has had this done to it, add

1 cup of buttermilk

and

2 cups of diced strawberries
and fold together gently with your hands. Scoop out half-cup portions of dough onto a prepared baking sheet, a couple inches apart, and push down into roundish blobs. Brush with a little bit of beaten egg, garnish with slices of lemon or strawberry, and sprinkle with sugar.

Bake until they lift easily off the tray and are deeply golden brown and fragrant and lovely.

Depending on your oven, this could be anywhere from twenty five minutes to a bit more than half an hour.

the problem with whoopie pies, a plea for help

Something amazing happened.

For my darling Joe's birthday I gave him a beautiful French film poster. An enormous red one sheet, 63 " x 47", from a film by his favorite director. But that's not the amazing thing. I discovered that framing would cost at least twice what the poster did (and it wasn't cheap either), so I would have to save up for the framing; hanging the poster would be a gift for another occasion. That was last April.

Along comes our two year anniversary and I decide the occasion has arrived, but I still can't afford the price quoted me by the framers. I bring the poster to work and my boss suggests we ask the installers for advice. (I should mention that I work for an organization that houses one of the largest archives of film print materials in the world, if not THE largest--I assume the Library of Congress has a sizable stock--and the task of framing and hanging of said collection falls to this group of guys.) I show them my poster and ask for their advice. They confirm that the job costs about $600, and that I'll want it mounted on an archival-quality board. And then the amazing thing: they said they'd frame it for me, FOR FREE! They don't normally do this, it just so happened that they had a frame, a board, and plexiglass the size of my poster, all of which they planned to throw away because of a few scuffs.

I am so incredibly grateful, and so inexcusably clueless as to how to thank them that I baked them whoopie pies, which seemed like a good start, but proved problematic for storage and transportation. See, the top of a cake is the smoothest and most delicate. Most people have experienced what happens when icing a cake that hasn't adequately cooled: the fragile crust peels a bit, getting crumbs mixed in with the icing. Well imagine that the fragile upper crust, the delicate cake top serves as both the top and bottom of the dessert. Even when cooled to past the point of most normal cakes, the bottom of the pie (the lower upper crust) would stick to the plate, creating a big old hole, ruining the aesthetic.

I'll consider that perhaps this is a sign that whoopie pies are not the best way to thank my framer friends, nevertheless, this is a problem with whoopie pies that needs solving. Does anyone know how to prevent it? Do I need to wait longer? Freeze the cakes? Use a cooling rack? A little help would be greatly appreciated.

whoopie pies!

My friend Ryan gave me a whoopie pie pan for Christmas. Essentially, it's a normal nonstick cookie sheet with shallow circular grooves in which to spoon batter--very exciting. I bet they make perfect muffin tops, my #3 fave baked good.

This is my first draft. They were made from a mix and I don't think they're technically whoopie pies, more like chocolate sandwich cookies. Still, mega tasty.

my first bread pudding

20 minutes before people arrived for our last minute Labor Day BBQ, I still didn't know I was going to make this. But we didn't know how many people were going to show up/ if we were going to have enough food and we'd had these two loaves of stale sourdough in the fridge for about a month so, you know, transitive property.

I adapted this recipe from one I found on grouprecipes.com. I used a higher baking temperature to begin with, so that the top formed a nice crust. I also subbed dried cherries for raisins and eliminated the meringue topping altogether. For my next round, I'm going to try adding fresh stone fruit and maybe brulee the top.

SOURDOUGH BREAD PUDDING WITH CHERRIES

INGREDIENTS

1 large round loaf of stale sourdough bread, torn into rough chunks
1 cup dried cherries
4 Tbs. butter
1/2 tsp cinnamon
6 eggs - yolks
1 cup sugar
1/3 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
6 cups milk
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla

DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 425°. Combine bread, cherries, and butter in a baking dish, mine was a large round tin. Sprinkle on cinnamon. In a large bowl mix well the egg yolks, 1 cup of sugar, salt, 1 tsp vanilla, and milk. Pour over bread, make sure to get the pieces at the top too. Bake for 30 minutes. Reduce the heat to 350° and continue baking for 20 minutes, or until the custard appears to be absorbed. Remove and let cool.

and now for another...

Thanksgiving pie that is. Certainly not Alice Waters approved, this one is in the Sandra Lee vein: peanut butter pie with pre-baked crust. Mostly mixing, and fairly excellent in the way that extra creamy peanut butter in pie crust could not be anything but -- excellent.



1 (8oz.) package cream cheese, softened
1 cup creamy peanut butter
1 cup sugar
1 tbs butter, softened
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup heavy cream, whipped
1 cooked pie crust

Whip cream and set aside. Mix together cheese, peanut butter, sugar, butter and vanilla until light and fluffy. Gently fold in whipped cream, a third at a time until combined. Pour into pie crust and refrigerate.

There was no pumpkin pie at my Thanksgiving, BUT...

Cousin Jonnie and Eve whipped out the recipe for Barbara Treves' Apple Pie, which took best in show at Evan Kleinman's Good Food Pie Contest last week. Beautiful (thanks to Eve), with uncomplicated flavor and a clean vanilla scent.




Recipe:
1-1/2 cup organic whole wheat pastry flour
1 cup unbleached, organic all purpose flour
2 tsp salt
1 Tablespoon vanilla powder
1 vanilla bean, split, seeds scraped
3 T sugar
1-1/4 cup sweet butter, unsalted (freshly made if possible)
1 Tablespoon white vinegar, chilled
6 - 8 Tablespoons ice water

Measure out all dry ingredients, combine and place in freezer, keep butter & liquid ingredients in refrigerator for at least one hour prior to preparation.

When ready, add dry ingredients to food processor and pulse to mix thoroughly. Add butter cubes and pulse until mixture resembles pea-sized meal. Add vinegar, pulse to mix then add ice water, 1 T at a time, until dough begins to stick together and when pinched by hand, holds together. Remove from processor and transfer to work surface. Divide the dough into two equal parts and gently form into balls, and wrap in waxed paper and refrigerate for at least one hour.

Filling
4 Tablespoons sweet butter
12 organic apples from local farmers market (mixture of Granny Smith, Fuji or other tart, crisp apples the best) – peeled, cored and sliced.
1 vanilla bean, split seeds scraped

1-1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1 cup organic sugar

4 Tablespoons organic, unbleached, all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup dried, sour cherries, soaked in 1/4 cup Calvados for at least 2 hours

Filling Preparation

Mix all dry ingredients, including vanilla bean seeds together. Add 2 tablespoons of this dry mixture to roasting pan, along with peeled and sliced apples. Place under broiler and broil until apples are slightly browned but not cooked through. Once nicely browned, remove and add rest of the ingredients, except butter.

Adding Filling to Pie Dough

Chill pie plate while you roll out 1 of the dough discs on a lightly floured surface until you get a disc that measure slightly larger than your pie plate and about 1/8 “– 1⁄4” thick. Pull out pie plate and gently place rolled out dough in plate.

Add broiled apples mixture, then dot with 4 T butter. Roll out 2nd disc into a circle about 1/8” – 1⁄4” thick and place on top of apples. Pinch top and bottom dough edges together and form a decorative edge.

Final Topping

1 egg
1 Tablespoons Cream
Turbinado Coarse Raw Sugar

Beat the egg and cream together in a small dish then brush top and edges of pie with mixture, sprinkle with sugar.

Bake in 400 degree oven for 45 mins. Cover edges of pie with aluminum foil if starting to brown too quickly. Turn pie in oven and cook an additional 15 mins. or until done.

Cool for at least two hours prior to serving.

Bread at home

I haven't bought bread for almost two months, yet I haven't eaten better bread since I lived in Europe.

I've been making all of my bread at home Ryan's bread machine. I'm no Parisian boulanger, but I can safely say that with the help of this simple device, I can make bread. This is such a fascinating world of cooking to enter. So much can go wrong (and did, at first). The different flours, the temperament of the yeast, the sweetening, the additions...it's amazing, and the changes that happen can be so subtle but remarkably noticeable. And finally, this bread hasn't yet gone bad on me. Even when it appears "stale," it toasts up to 80% of brand new in minutes.

I've settled on this mixture. It's given me a texture that I'm happy with. 

1.5 cups bread flour

1.5 whole wheat flour

3-5 tbsp maple syrup

1/2 tsp yeast mixed with roughly a tbsp sugar and a few ounces warm water, which should sit out and bubble up over the course of about half-a-day

1 cup water

roughly a tsp or so salt

There's no end to what you can throw in. I started out making raisin bread with some nutmeg and cinnamon, but found that the above mixture was the best for everyday use. If I have it, I'll throw in some ground flax. It has a mild nutty flavor and jacks up the nutritional content of the bread. It's such a treat to cut into it right after it comes out of the machine. 

Finally! Gourmet.com clears cobbler-family confusion.

A cobbler and a crisp are different things, no matter how many people use the terms interchangeably. Occasionally you'll hear "buckle" used in reference to either of these two, or less frequently, "brown Betty," which I'm sure is more common in the south (excuse the King of the Hill-informed stereotype). Luckily, the ever-informative Gourmet.com posted this (definitive?) list, distinguishing characteristics of each of these members of the cobbler-family, to steer our baking and eating endeavours toward greater PCdom. Here it is in full. Check back to the original piece for photos. They're incredibly helpful.

Think of a cobbler—fruit topped with a crust and baked—as a fruit pot pie. Most cobblers have a thick biscuit crust, which can either be cut into rounds (“cobbles”) or left as a single layer. Cobblers were originally made with a pie crust, and you can still find cooks in the American South who sandwich a fruit filling between a top and bottom crust made of pie dough. Eat a cobbler warm or cold, wrote Lettice Bryan in The Kentucky Housewife (1839). “Although it is not a fashionable pie for company, it is very excellent for family use.” A few of our favorite fillings for cobblers: stone fruit, sweet cherries, blackberries, apples, berries and brown sugar, or plums and almonds.

In a crisp, the fruit is sprinkled with a streusel-like mixture of butter, sugar, flour, and often oatmeal or nuts that has been rubbed together (or pulsed in a food processor). A crisp is called a crumble in Britain. Try our recipes for plum berry crisp, peach crisp, apple oatmeal crumble, and fall fruit crumble.

A brown Betty is similar to a crisp, but breadcrumbs are used, and they’re layered in with the fruit rather than scattered on top. Try a recipe for brown Betty with apples; add prunes; or make individual little brown Bettys.

In a buckle, the fruit is generally folded into (or sprinkled onto) cake batter and then covered with a topping similar to that found on a crisp; the cake batter will “buckle” as it bakes. Try our recipes for blueberry nectarine buckle, raspberry sour cream buckle, and lemon blueberry buckle (registration required).

A pandowdy is a deep-dish fruit dessert that originated in the hearth kitchen as a way to use up leftover dough (typically bread dough) on baking days. The thick crust, which would become as hard as a cracker, was then broken up and left to soak in the cooking juices. The end result was similar to a bread pudding. The pandowdy evolved with the times, and by the 1850s and ’60s, most women had switched to a biscuit crust, which had become the default crust for all baked and steamed fruit desserts. After the 1860s, both biscuit crusts and pie crusts were used. Up until the mid-20th century, apples were the only fruit and molasses the only sweetener used in pandowdies. Try our recipes for apricot pandowdy and old-fashioned apple pandowdy.

Can a bagel made in Florida be a New York Bagel?

That was the question asked by Sun Sentinel writer John Tanasychuk. His article, on which I based "Florida Bakery Makes Brooklyn Water, Offers Hope for LA's Bagels," says Yes, emphatically.


To be honest though, the whole NY bagel as holy grail thing (pun intended) is total meshugas. The NY bagels I've eaten brought me no closer to enlightenment, nor did they give me deeper happiness, or tighter buns. I've gleaned far greater satisfaction from the Bagel Broker down the street. So the idea that someone would spend that kind of money on a purification + mineralization system to turn Florida tap water into Brooklyn tap water -- if it even works -- is beyond me. Oy!

The SI post is rant-free, I swear by my bubbie.

Lily's birthday cupcakes, part 1

Baking mini chocolate cupcakes for Lily's birthday parties has become something of a personal tradition. I do it partly because it's sweet, but mostly because I love when her friends say, "You made these?!" with surprise, before pounding down another three or four tiny creme cheese frosted cakes. Of course, I did make them. But I had help.


You see, the secret to Lily's birthday cupcakes is boxed cake mix with double pudding. I know there are those who find this to be a cop out, those who'd rather spend a lot of time and money to make a decent to good cake because it helps them see themselves as better people. But I say with total earnestness that I believe in boxed cake mix because, after all, it's about baking better cakes. Yes, Uncle Duncan (Hines) and Aunt Betty (Crocker) are the originators of my "secret" "family" recipes, and I take no shame in admitting it, because if they got cake so incredibly right, which again, is so much better than your Aunt Sally, why mess with it? Note: I feel this way about Heinz Ketchup as well.

When I was little, Nancy Silverton and her kids used to be at all of the family birthday parties. The gatherings were almost always pot-lucky, always a little pastiche-y, and everyone contributed their specialties. So when it came to dessert, my mom would bake a cake (from a box), cousin Licia would make the creme cheese frosting, and Nancy would frost the cake (because it requires artistry). As my mom likes to tell this story, at the first of these parties, Nancy's kids (who already had pretty refined palates, as you can imagine) took just one bite of the dessert collaboration before their minds were blown by its perfection. "Why don't your cakes taste like this?" they asked their mother, the world-renowned baker.

Boxed cake mix is simple and delicious. But perfect creme cheese frosting is a little more demanding of its maker. However, since I must get down to real work, I'll save that for Part 2 of Lily's birthday cupcakes.

I Covered Cake Monkey in Ink

I conducted my first phone interview with Cake Monkey's Lisa J. Olin on Sunday. She and Elizabeth Belkind were busily trying to pull together everything they needed for the launch of their new line of breakfast pastries the following day and I was slightly flustered, so the conversation lasted all of about 3 1/2 minutes. Of those few minutes, I can only remember that I used variations of the word "excited" with astounding frequency.

Read the resulting post here.

Hamantashen on JST

It feels thematically acceptable, even appropriate, to file this post according to Jewish Standard Time, which measures time by (often gross) approximation. Indeed, according to JST, posting on hamantashen almost a month after Purim is actually timely.

When people ask my co-baker Rebecca to tell them the story of Purim, she says, "Glad you asked," and dives right in. I do not. Despite the "Esther saves the Jewish people from the evil Haman" part, I can't shake the fact that it is essentially a story of a Jewess who tricks the king into marrying her. (What a stereotype.) So, I'll leave it to wikipedia to fill in the details if you're interested.

For our purposes, it's only really important to know that the featured cookie is named after Haman, the one who ordered the Jews to be killed and depending on who you ask, the triangular cookie is an approximation of either his hat or his ear. However, Becca and I are partial to the hat camp because we are logical people and the idea of triangle ears is absurd.

RECIPE:
Dough:
3 cups flour
1 cup sugar
2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
10 Tbs. butter, cut into cubes
2 eggs
2 egg yolks (reserve whites for egg wash)
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Egg wash:
2 egg whites, lightly beaten with 2 tsp. sugar

TIPS FROM BUBBIE:
-the less you handle, the better
-careful pinching
-roll out thin

Combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a Cuisinart, pulse several times. Add butter, pulse and then process. In a small bowl, beat eggs, yolks and vanilla. Pour egg mixture into bowl, pulse and mix (bottom up) for 10+ seconds. Refrigerate in a ball for at least 1 hour.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, grease pan and line with parchment paper. Allow dough to warm for 20 minutes.

Roll to 1/8" thick, cut circles using a 3" round cookie cutter. Place 2 tsp. of filling in the center and brush perimeter with egg wash. Lift dough to partially cover filling. DO NOT PINCH!!! Seal. Brush tops with egg wash. Bake for 15-18 minutes.

Cool and nosh your heart out.

NOTES: Becca thought it would be a great idea to add a little almond extract, so we substituted 1/2 tsp. vanilla for 1/2 tsp. almond--excellent call. We noticed that the more generous we were with the egg wash, the prettier the cookies turned out. Also, the cookies made with the 3" circle were huge, so we made some of them smaller and although I preferred them that way, the fact that only a few remained by the end of the day suggests that they were so delish that nobody else really cared.

CHALLAH!

Making challah was like my second Bat Mitzvah. It was a more tangible coming of age, to say the least, and I believe I am much more of a woman today than I was at 13 thanks in no small part [I estimate 70%] to the fact that I am now learned in the making of the bread.



Ingredients:
5 cups flour
1/2 cup cugar
1/2 tsp. salt
2 pkgs yeast
3 eggs
1/4 cup butter
1 1/2 cups boiling water

Combine flour, salt, yeast and sugar . Melt the butter in the 1 1/2 cups boiling water then add them to the mix. Add 2 of the eggs. Kneed for 10 minutes, slowly adding flour so it becomes doughy - DON'T ADD TO MUCH! Refrigerate, 1 hour.

Knock down dough, divide into 3 sections and then braid each to form the challah. Place the braided dough on a greased sheet on the top shelf of the oven (WITHOUT HEAT) with a pan of water on the lower shelf, for 1 hour.

Remove from the oven and glaze with the third egg, beaten. Cook at 350 degrees for about 1/2 hour.




NOTES: The bread's lopsided tumescence is easily remedied by rolling out the individual strands of the braid more evenly. The texture was perfectly pillowy though and thoroughly addicting. Also, the bread was on the sweeter side of the challah spectrum which I'm not used to (just a matter of what you grew up with) but my friends loved.


*Thanks to Leslie who, in keeping with the Bat Mitzvah analogy, acted as honorary rabbi and thereby made my womandom possible.

Valentine's Day for Low Maintenance Ladies

Fancy dinners be damned! If I were comfortable riding a bike and mah boo hadn't already made cute plans for tomorrow, I'd be all over this mother...



From Daily Dish:
"Last year for Valentine's Day we suggested you woo your sweetie with a cupcake crawl: hop onto your bike and pedal from bakery to bakery. To help you plan your route, we drew up the Great L.A. Cupcake Map, which you can always find at latimes.com/cupcakes. You could go cupcake crawling in your car, which is helpful when you're trying to cram as many bakeries as possible into one day. But if you ride a bicycle, you'll burn off every last calorie. It's a scientific fact."

It's romantic AND scrumbo. Or is it romantic by virtue of scrumbo? Just the thought sets my heart a-flutter.

Cobbler: Therapy for the Poor

Too many bad movies have me down. They're exhausting and soul-crushing and take so much time away from otherwise enjoyable activities. Normally, I can manage. But coupled with debilitating PMS, bad movies make Emma a dull girl. So this afternoon, I decided to be proactive...that's right, I went to FOOD for Amanda's cobbler. Amanda is the consummate Mother Goose and you can taste it in everything she bakes. Her cobbler is warm and nurturing like her hugs. It has saved me from more panic attacks than I care remember and it worked its magic again today.

On Wednesdays, Amanda works at the Santa Monica farmers market so she only uses the best of what's in season and her cobbler fillings change accordingly. Today it was pear/cranberry.


I know that $5 for cobbler seems a bit excessive to those of us who are unemployed, but I look at it this way: I could either spend $5 on cobbler or $100 on therapy. So clearly, buying cobbler saves money. Clearly.

FOOD
10571 Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90064

Strawberry Coconut EXPLOSION

In honor of the great Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Alana and I made an MLKcake (almost one too many Ks). If you said to me, "Aaron, make me the whitest (racially) cake you can think of," I'd probably make this cake. This was the first cake I've had a hand in.

We got the recipe from here after troving some food blogs. I left out the coconut pieces in the cake because it seemed like overkill. Coconut frosting, coconut topping, AND coconut pieces in the cake. Neh. This frosting is also really, really sweet, and good lord, we have way too much left over. Cut everything in half, and then, add even less sugar. The coconut milk is so sweet already that I don't think its really necessary. Emma noted while we were making it that the butter in the frosting is just for show to make the frosting more malleable. Whipped cream might be good in between the two layers, kind of like a shortcake but...actual cake. I like this texture for decorative purposes. If you're not concerned about that, then you could probably cut some of the butter too.

Other than that small stuff, this was good, good cake.